Lubartów Ghetto was established by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II, and existed officially from 1941 until October 1942. The Polish Jews of the town of Lubartów were confined there initially. The ghetto inmates also included Jews deported from other cities in the vicinity including Lublin and Ciechanów and the rest of German-occupied Europe for the total of 3,500 Jews in its initial stages including 2,000 Jews from Slovakia. In May 1942 additional transport from Slovakia with 2,421 Jews arrived. The Lubartów Ghetto was one of hundreds of such ghettos established in the course of the Holocaust in occupied Poland. The maximum number of prisoners at any one time was 4,500 according to Virtual Shtetl. The ghetto was dissolved when all its prisonersmen, women, and childrenwere sent to the Belzec extermination camp among other secretive killing centres established by the SS, to be murdered under the guise of "resettlement". Background The first mention of the Jewish community in Lubartów comes from 1592. By 1676 there were 80 Jews in the town, operating 15 breweries. The Beth din rabbinical court was also established. In the 17th and 18th centuries the Jews received numerous privileges consecutively from Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki (in 1678), Józef Lubomirski (in 1688) and Janusz Aleksander Sanguszko family (in 1780, and 1796). There were three synagogues and two Jewish cemeteries, one of which had not been used since the 19th century. In the interwar period the town's population was 53.6 percent Jewish according to the national census with 3,269 Jews living there in 1921. By the time of the invasion of Poland in 1939 that number has already gone down to 42 percent due to migration flows. The German army entered the town on 19 September 1939, early on in the attack against Poland. On the morning of 12 October 1939, the German army ordered all of the Jews to go to the market square where they were surrounded by machine guns. This allowed for the German army to ransack and rob Jewish-owned homes and businesses. This lasted all day. Deportation and execution The deportation of Jews to the nearby towns of Firlej, Ostrów Lubelski, and Kamionka, started at the beginning of November 1939. All of the Jews were told to leave. There were, though, a few who stayed to work for the German Army. They were exiled from Lubartów until September 1940. A Judenrat ()